How
is it that so few will be able to discern the evil intentions of the
Antichrist? The loss of the Orthodox
Faith is the foremost reason. With the
loss of Truth, man’s proper relationship to God (Who is Reality) is lost, and everything
becomes distorted and confused. The
hierarchy amongst created things here on earth (amongst angels, men, and things)
is lost, and confusion and relativism become the new measuring rods of
what is good and right - multiculturalism, eclecticism, ecumenism, syncretism,
and all the rest.
Max
Picard spoke in more detail of this current state of the world when asked a
similar question - how could Hitler have come to power in Germany. Fr Seraphim Rose gives us the quotes:
And this brings us to
the spiritual state of our modern people, not necessarily under the direct
influence of occultism or modern art, but still that very state which occultism
and modern art expressed.
This we can see by a
few pages from a book by another German, who is actually a Jew, became
converted to Catholicism, became totally disillusioned with modern Europe and
left the cities and went, found himself a place on a lake in Switzerland where
last I heard he was still living. His name is Max Picard. He wrote a book
called The Flight from God which describes how the life of modern man,
especially life in the cities, is one of a complete running away from reality, running
away from God. After the Second World War he wrote a second book called Hitler in Ourselves. Here he very nicely expresses what is
the background for all these movements.
“During a trip to Germany in
1932, the head of an influential political party called upon me to ask how it
was possible that Hitler had become so much of a figure and had gained so many
followers. I pointed to a magazine which was lying on the table and told him to
look at it. Page one was filled by a half-naked dancer; on page two, soldiers
were drilling with a machine gun, and farther down a scientist was shown in his
laboratory; page three featured the evolution of the bicycle from the middle of
the nineteenth century to the present day, and a Chinese poem was printed next
to that; the following page was divided between the calisthenics of factory
workers during a rest period and the writing technique of a South American
Indian tribe by means of knotted strings; on the opposite page, Senator
So-and-so was depicted in his summer retreat.
“„This,’ I said, „is
how modern man grasps the things of the world outside himself. Modern man drags
all things toward himself chaotically and without cohesion; this proves that
his own inner life is a chaos lacking cohesion. Modern man no longer confronts
the things of the world as solidly existing, nor do things register in his mind
individually; neither does he approach a particular thing by a particular act:
modern man with his chaotic inner life has a correspondingly chaotic outer
world whirling toward him. What is coming is no longer scrutinized; it suffices
that anything at all should be coming along. To this disjointed tumult anything
or anybody could admix -- Adolf Hitler, too: he gets inside a man without his
noticing how he got there; from that point on, it no longer depends upon the
victim but upon the skill of Adolf Hitler, whether he will merely pass through
that man’s mind or take hold of it.’
“The disjointedness
of a magazine, however, seems old-fashioned, almost handmade, compared to the
radio. In the radio the business of disjointedness has become mechanized: 6
A.M. calisthenics; 6:10 A.M. recorded music; 7 A.M. news; 8 A.M. Morse-alphabet
course; 9 A.M. morning sermon; 9:30 A.M. „In the Lake Dwellers' Village’; 10
A.M. Beethoven sonata for flute and piano; 10:30 A.M. farming lecture; 10:45
A.M. world news; 11 A.M. Overture to [Wagner’s] „Rienzi’—and so on till the
Spanish course at 10:10 P.M. and the Jazz hour at 10:30 P.M.
“This world of the
radio not only is disjointed;” That’s classical radio;
that’s good radio.
“it produces disjointedness: it presents all things
in such a way that they will not hang together from the very start and thus are
forgotten one by one even before they have disappeared; from the start they are
shrouded in a haze of oblivion. This outer world presupposes that man’s mind is
no longer capable of perceiving the things of this world in any context -- as
they are, that is, as they endure, and as they are correlated to one another in
their nature --” rather “it operates primarily toward the inner discontinuity,
toward the disjointedness of man, and with that it works.
“There no longer is
an outer world which can be perceived, because it is a jumble -- likewise,
there is no longer in man a mind able to perceive with clarity, because his
inner world, too, is a jumble. Therefore, man no longer approaches objects by
an act of will; he no longer selects the objects of the external world and no
longer examines them: the world is fluid; disjointed objects move past
disjointed man. It no longer matters what passes by; what counts is only that
something should pass by. Into this line-up anything could sneak, including
Adolf Hitler; and one prefers that at least he, Adolf Hitler, should turn up than
to have nothing turn up at all. „Heil’ to him; for not only does he march along
as part of the jumble, but he also sees to it that the march of the jumble does
not stop -- he mechanizes the flow of events and things assembly-line fashion
and does it better than anyone else.
“The Big City
is the expression of the disjointed as such. In it the disjointed has become
stone, nay, concrete. Constantly the lines of the houses are interrupted by the
movings of automobiles, of streetcars and trains which cut through everything
like machines. Human figures appear as dissolved into indistinct blots,
hurtling back and forth between the walls of houses and of streets like pawns
of evil powers. The sky itself seems removed farther from earth than elsewhere,
and even the sky has lost continuity with itself, for it is constantly cut
through by sharp-silhouetted planes.
“From this outer
jumble, then, Adolf Hitler could easily sneak into the inner jumble; in this
disjointedness he could show himself beside anything because he fitted
anything: such as he was, he fitted into anything disjointed.
“And as again and
again he showed himself in this jumble, he became more distinct than the other
parts of the chaos; one got used to him and accepted him as one accepts a
toothpaste which turns up again and again in the chaos of advertising pages.
Soon he appeared as the only reality in a world wherein everything else
manifested itself only to vanish again immediately.
“Sorel believes that in a modern democracy it
is possible for a handful of men to usurp the tools of power and to establish a
dictatorship. That is true. But it is possible only because today everybody is
slithering toward anything – and thus one might slide toward the means of power
without noticing it, while others notice it even less. One need not make any
special effort; one need not fight for the instruments of power -- one just
grabs them as one grabs at anything else in the chaos wherein one slips. It is
merely an accident that this should happen in the realm of politics; in this
world of the momentary and the disjointed anything else might be grabbed as
well, in [lieu]” place “of politics and dictatorship. Here, there exists no
history of power-assumption; no history, no theory, no doctrine counts except
the theory and the doctrine of chaos.
“Hitler had no need
to conquer; everything was preconquered for him through the structure
of discontinuity, through the general disjointedness. As a result, such a
dictator tries to make up for that sham of Mein Kampf,”
which he wrote, “which really was not necessary for the assumption of power:
now that he possesses power, he strives with all the gestures, with all the big
noise of power, and by violence and murder to prove that he is the dictator by
his own act and not by an accident of chaos.
“Only in a world of
total discontinuity could a nullity such as Hitler become Fuehrer, because only
where everything is disjointed has comparison fallen into disuse. There was
only Hitler, the nullity, before everybody’s eyes, and in this instable world
wherein everything was changing at every moment one was glad that at least the
one nullity, Hitler, remained stable before one’s eyes. An orderly world, a
hierarchy, would automatically have placed the nullity, Hitler, into nothingness;
he could not have been noticed. Hitler was the excrement of a demoniacal world;
a world of truth in its order would have pushed him aside.”cccxxxvii
Again we see the same
thing that it is the world, it is we the ordinary people who are living this
very kind of life of disjointedness and used to the very phenomena which we see
around us -- the newspapers, the radio, the television, the movies --
everything which is oriented toward pieces which do not fit together. There’s
no God; there’s no overwhelming, underlying pattern to things, no God, no
order. And the order which we see in our life is only left over from the
previous time when people still believed in God. And that’s why Solzhenitsyn
can look at America
and say, “It’s coming here.”cccxxxviii You are sort of cutoff off; you don't
see it. But it’s coming here because that’s the way, that’s what’s happening in
the world. And of course, Americans are blinded because we’re used to having
our food...
Fr. H: We’re
protected.
Fr. S: ...and very much cut off from
the reality. . . .
Source: Orthodox Survival Course, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6SBg9Qgz94oMHpLMVF4SGZ4eG8/view,
downloaded 12 Feb. 2017, pgs. 284-7
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the
Souð!
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